But then the knife slipped and time slowed and I could see what was about to happen.
How my fingers would lose their grasp on it. How the knife would flip in the air, blade side aimed down. How my arm would be in the way. How the impossibly sharp blade of the knife would land, perpendicular to my arm, slicing my wrist, and how it wouldn’t hurt at first, not until I saw the blood.
Then I was feeling so much. This rush of pain, all at once, radiating out from that one line below my wrist and coursing through me, pulsing in places the blade of the knife hadn’t even touched.
It shouldn’t have been bleeding so much—it was one little slice. I rinsed it in cold water until it numbed some. I lifted my arm over my head because I heard somewhere that if you get a cut that won’t stop bleeding you should hold it high over your head. Gravity will pull the blood down to your feet and if you hold it up there long enough, it’ll slow the bleeding.
But, this time, gravity didn’t make it stop.
Blood came pooling down my arm, dripping all over the white sink.
The mirror showed me a gruesome image of myself, the way the girls might have seen it, if they were there watching.
I must have been making noise, or else my mom must have woken from her own sleep and needed to visit our shared bathroom at just the exact moment I needed her. Which at first felt like some far-off answer to some unspoken plea buried inside me. And then it flipped and felt like the exact opposite.
Because next thing, my mom was bursting in and there I was, dropping my arm and hiding it behind my back, forgetting there was a pool of blood in the sink.
Don’t let her think— Fiona Burke’s commanding, distinctive voice started to say inside my left ear, but that was drowned out by my mom’s shrieking.
Before she wrestled the arm out from behind my back, and before the blood started coursing out quicker than before and running in thick rivulets to the tiled bathroom floor, before her eyes alighted on the knife and the mess of the sink and then shifted fast to me, growing wide, and wider still, I think I knew what she was thinking. And so I knew just what she’d say:
“Lauren! Honey, what— Oh my God, baby. What did you do to yourself?”
It wasn’t possible to be a girl with a bloody arm and a dirty knife in my mom’s world without having done a sick and twisted thing to myself. To her, this scene she stumbled on starring me and the butterfly knife in the upstairs bathroom could mean only one thing.
She’d read all about this. She’d gone over the case studies in her textbooks and written papers about adolescent depression and done all that research to get an A on the last one, and she was hunting for signs she must have missed.
I would have argued it. I would have explained, even if I couldn’t tell her about the missing girl this knife belonged to.
But when I looked down into the sink, I saw the blood-smeared nail clippers.
That’s the thing: They really were only nail clippers. And then I saw the shards all over the bathroom, on the sink and the floor and the shelf and even the top of the toilet and the bathtub. The sharp, bloody pieces of glass that reminded me of Natalie Montesano, who still wore bits of broken windshield in her face.
Oh.
Oh no. The mirror. It had been shattered. It was beginning to look like I’d broken the mirror and sliced myself up with it. Did I?
One glance at my arm told me I did.